Informed CIO: Cloud Standards

Joe Masters Emison01/01/13

Informed CIO: Cloud Standards

The good news about cloud standards: They’re not as necessary as Internet standards were at this same point in the development of the Internet. The bad news? The cloud standard situation is a bit of a mess. We have standards-developing organizations creating cloud standards that aren’t being used, we have vendors creating proprietary APIs that are being adopted as de facto standards without anyone’s permission, and everything that even resembles a standard is more vendor-driven than anything we’ve seen in the past. Whether that will come back to haunt us remains to be seen.

In this report, we’ll explain the drivers for cloud standards, discuss the importance of evaluating whether any given standard is worthwhile, walk through the main cloud standards (formal, de facto, and otherwise) by category and give a sneak peek at results from our new InformationWeek Standardization Survey. Finally, we asked six thought leaders in the field for predictions — their answers might surprise you. (S6410113)